LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
INDIAN DEADLOCK
S1R,—Your correspondent " Z " nearly (but not quite) stated the essential absurdity of the Indian situation. This is the way it has become taken for granted that it is merely a " Gandhi versus Government " or " Gandhi versus Jinnah " controversy—a kind of international boxing match. As your correspondent points out, there are other Indians, many of them men of political and intellectual distinction and conversant with our own and international affairs. But they must remain disfranchised, and nothing can possibly be done until there is " Hindu-Moslem unity "- which apparently means complete agreement between two men.
That " unity " can never come. Mr. Jinnah's terms have been made dear. Mr. Gandhi must unequivocally give him "Pakistan "—two Pakistans, the Punjab and adjacent Moslem-inhabited territory, and Bengal, with its overwhelmingly Hindu parts taken away (except for some which are economically complementary to the Moslem districts). No one but Moslems are to have any say in this. It is extraordinary that people here think that Mr. Jinnah (who is neither a Punjabi nor a Bengali) has the right to make this claim, and that Mr. Gandhi (also neither a Punjabi nor a Bengali) the right and authority to concede it. I know nothing so astonishing since people accepted the Sudeten German propaganda on its own terms. As to the Punjab, its people (who have a Coalition Government of Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, which at any rate functions) surely might settle their own destiny. As to Bengal, it is true that there is a small Moslem majority ; but the wealth and tradition and culture of the Bengali nation are overwhelmingly Hindu. Bengal Moslems join in Hindu festivals, Moslem poets write on Hindu gods and legends, a thousand years of literature show hardly a Moslem tinge anywhere. Almost all the endowments of Calcutta University have been given by Hindus. You can—and should—help a backward majority to a higher level of economic and cultural life, but you have no right to submerge to such a majority's standards, everything by which the nation has lived for a millennium. No one here seems to realise the absurd lengths to which recent agitation has gone. Rabindranath Tagore, who was no Hindu, told me that the demand was made that his account of his grandmother's death-bed should be rewritten because when dying she invoked (as a Hindu does) the name of Krishna. Moslem boys must not be made aware that their Hindu neighbours ever mentioned Krishna's name, although at any Krishna festival you can see Moslem boys in hundreds joining in the show (just as Hindus join in Moslem festivals). It was demanded also that all University appointments must be on a communal basis—that a professor should be appointed to a chair, not because he was a good historian or chemist, but because he was a good bigot. When Lord Curzon's Partition cut across Bengal's national consciousness, both Hindus and Moslems rose in the first effective agita- tion India hhs known, and the work had to be undone. I should like to know what British district officers in Bengal think of the proposed Pakistanisation of the most nationally conscious people of India by an arrangement between two outsiders who, however eminent, know next to nothing of Bengal. Never have we got into a worse spin, even in India, than by making all political progress depend upon an arrangement which, if made, would be a piece of " damnable cheek," and would not be worth the paper on which it was written. The Cripps' proposals laid down fair conditions for " Pakistan."—Yours sincerely,
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